What’s Next For Technology In 2019?

Today I’m putting my Professor Trelawney hat on and asking what’s next for business technology in 2019. I’m not talking about the bleeding edge or borderline science fiction stuff here. I’m really interested in the cutting edge technology that businesses will be able to draw value out of this year.

The Internet Of Things

2019 is the year when IoT and Industry 4.0 will really take off. A lot of the “late follower” companies have now seen the direction of things and worked out where their product lies in the new IoT landscape. We will see a lot more infrastructure support to go behind industrial applications as well as the more glamorous and visible developments. Outside of Philips Hue bulbs, a lot of factories will embrace IoT technologies in multiple layers from engineering components, line controllers and plant controllers. Standards to define communications between those components will be more important to customers selecting components. We’ll see more domestic applications for IoT too, especially with the fabulous Christmas Amazon had with Alexa and Echo. People will be wanting more things to plug into their Smart Home!

Augmented Reality

Towards the end of 2019, Augmented Reality applications will become a reality across light and heavy industry. The office workplace won’t see much in terms of AR this year until the tech becomes a little lighter and lower cost. We can expect to see some real applications rather than the toys that are currently more commonplace with Augmented Reality. Improvements in mobile technology such as Apple’s AR Kit and Google’s AR Core will have mobile devices leading the way in AR applications for home users.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence will power applications behind the scenes this year. Beyond the smart assistant devices (Alexa, Google Assistant etc) there are some powerful AI tools and frameworks developing. AI technology hasn’t changed much in the last 40 years, but what we have now is a huge cloud-based infrastructure that can crunch phenomenal amounts of data like never before. Just look at IBM’s hourly weather forecasting system, for example. The Internet Of Things will be increasingly supported by AI infrastructure to assist with gathering insights into business data (e.g. sales data) as well as more industrial applications (e.g. predictive maintenance of machines and components etc). Augmented Reality will increasingly use AI to learn to recognise objects in the real world and adapt programs to the user’s surroundings.

Remote Working

As companies begin to compete harder for staff than customers they will be turning their eyes further afield to find talent. This will mean that more and more companies will employ more and more remote workers. Firstly, those companies will need to learn how to better manage remote teams (it’s generally done incredibly badly and workers feel isolated). After that, the tooling will explode. Already we have tools such as Sucoco, Slack and many more. This year those tools will diversify and grow to create new ways (beyond the dull conference call) for remote teams to work together.

Conclusion

I looked into the tea leaves and these are my predictions for 2019! If you are interested in any of the above areas of technology, please fill in the contact form below and get in touch with us!

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Nick McKenna

Nick McKenna is a (polymath) computer programmer and scaled Agile consultant. Nick has been a professional programmer for over 20 years and an Agile guru for nearly as long! Nick's specialities include progressive web app development, mobile app development, the Internet Of Things, Azure cloud development, systems integration, Scaled Agile Framework, Scrum, Lean, LeSS, Scrum At Scale and much much more.